Friday, 12 August 2011

Earlier this year I broke my all time promise of not reviewing chocolate biscuits and opened the floodgates for several reader requests to come my way. It may have taken me a while to do, but I took all of your suggestions seriously and with the aid of my work colleagues have slowly but surely made my way round the supermarket biscuit shelves. Below are some very short, concise reviews on numerous different chocolate biscuits that were suggested to me. I hope you enjoy the photos etc. I may regret saying this but again if you have any further suggestions please send them through.

It was an education to learn of the existence of these but given my love of caramel chocolate it was an offering I certainly had no qualms trying out. The 300.0g pack cost me £1.40 in my local Tesco - on a £/Kg basis these were at a price premium versus standard McVitie's Chocolate Digestives.

In size these Caramel Digestives were smaller in hand at around two thirds the stature of the normal digestives. I was hoping the that the caramel integration was going to involve some sort of liquidy centre, however I was to be disappointed by more a chewy toffee like substance that ran between the thin chocolate layer and the biscuit base. Ultimately the caramel layer was more disappointing than it was poor, it was fine for what it was, but it only offered an extra added dose of sweetness to the taste which negated the usual saltiness of the biscuit to a degree. Not horrible, but not a pack of biscuits I would rush out and buy again.

The majority of the reviews today are ones that have been asked for by readers but these new McVitie's Quirks first caught the eye when I saw them announced in the trade back in July - See HERE. You got to love the marketing spiel: "Our research has shown this launch will be accepted extremely well by consumers" ... oh really now eh :D

I bought these again in Tesco on an introductory £1.00 offer - this got me a pack of about 16 biscuits that had a catch-weight of 175.0g. In terms of packaging and presentation everything to me cam across as very lazily designed. The outer foil wrapper was overly plain and simplistic (boring!!!), whilst the unbranded biscuits themselves looked horrendously generic and unexciting. Taste-wise these tested a little better than they looked. The biscuit portion offered a generic set of floury, sugar noted flavours, though the inner hazelnut hinted chocolate cream at least went some way to taking them on further and adding a little more interest. These biscuits were 'accepted extremely' averagely by this consumer :D

According to a good few people who fedback after my classic chocolate biscuit bits and bob post, Chocolate Vienesse biscuits were a shocking absentee from my original selection. Personally I wouldn't bracket them in alongside those all time greats, though I was more than happy to give them a ChocolateMission airing.

Chocolate Vienesse come ten-a-penny in this country so I wasn't lacking options when it came to choosing which to review. I was initially keen on the the Marks & Spencer ones, though I thought I would settle for the ones I think the British public know best, which are these made by Fox's. The current packaging and presentation was all fair from my perspective though, I did get a niggling sense that the size of the biscuits had been slimmed down since I last had them. Taste wise nothing seemed out of place with the buttery shortcake like biscuit a nice light foil for the inner sticky layer of milk chocolate. The chocolate cut through in the taste was of a sound quality, however the light biscuit and chocolate flavour hit were both a little short-lived for my liking compared to other more substantial biscuits reviewed recently.

I know this isn't strictly a chocolate biscuit but hey the rules are pretty lax around here :D The McVitie's Hobnobs Medley bars have been out for almost a year and I since that time I have tried all three of the original flavours - Raisin (HERE), Hazelnut (HERE) and Peanut (HERE). In April 2011, McVitie's announced they would be bring a £2m advertising campaign to further push the Medley range (HERE).

If you read that article above you will notice there was no mention made of this new Caramel Milk Chocolate flavour which I found in my local Sainsbury's store. As far as I'm aware this flavour has replaced the Peanut one, though it wasn't as if that flavour had great distribution anyway. In construct this bar was a mirror image of the others in that it was an oat and wheat flake bases bar which was fused with a sticky honey tasting like glaze. On the underside of the bar a caramel flavoured chocolate was coated reasonably thickly and provided a better than fair chocolatey taste that did indeed have a little hint of buttery syrup to it. Cereal bars aren't a snack of choice for me all that often but I would happily have one of these again.